A top commander of the pro-Russia insurgency in eastern Ukraine said yesterday that Ukrainian forces have seized a key town, leaving the rebel region’s largest city of Donetsk surrounded.
The statement by Igor Girkin, a former Russian special services officer, appears to be a significant admission by the rebels that Ukrainian forces are gaining the upper hand in the four-month-old fight.
Strelkov said the town of Krasnyi Luch, which lies on one of the two main roads between Donetsk and the rebel-held east’s other main city of Luhansk, “has been taken by the enemy.”
“The Donetsk-Horlivka group of the fighters of Novorossiya is completely surrounded,” he said on a rebel social media page. Novorossiya, or New Russia, is a local term for the rebel region.
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko told reporters yesterday that he could not confirm the claim that Krasnyi Luch was under Ukrainian control.
In Donetsk, a spokesman for the city administration said at least one person was killed and several injured in shelling of the city’s southern area yesterday. Spokesman Maxim Rovninsky also told reporters that about 30 apartment blocks came under fire during the night.
As the fighting proceeds, concerns are rising about a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Luhansk, where fighting has been heavier and more prolonged.
Russian news agencies quoted a statement from the Luhansk city administration saying that the city has been without water and electricity for a week and that most of its stores are closed.
Russia has been pushing for a humanitarian mission to Luhansk, but Kiev and Western countries suspect that could be a pretext for sending in troops. Western countries say Russia has assembled about 20,000 troops just across the border.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
A registered sex offender from the US who went missing after entering Taiwan has been found and would be deported in light of the risk he poses to the public, the National Immigration Agency (NIA) said yesterday. The agency launched a search for Levi Forrest Wallace, 43, after it was informed by the American Institute of Taiwan (AIT) that he had entered Taiwan on Oct. 2 on a tourist visa. He was not on the US government’s wanted list. Wallace was sentenced to 90 days in jail with a two-year probation in 2001 after he was convicted of sexual delinquency of
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